Democrats win the House as GOP strengthens hold on the Senate

The days of one-party control are over.Democrats seized control of the U.S. House of Representatives while Republicans held the Senate on Tuesday (Nov. 6) in a midterm election that drew record numbers of voters to the polls. House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California said the victory was “about restoring the Constitution’s checks and balances to the Trump administration,” as well as a check on Senate Republicans.The Democrats’ new House majority was propelled by a record number of female candidates. Women hold 84 House seats; however, that share is expected to expand to more than 100 when all the final tallies are announced.Midterm elections are traditionally a referendum on the party in power at the federal level. This one, though, was seen by many Americans as a referendum on Donald Trump’s presidency and his party, the Republican Party. Heavily criticized for its racist overtones, the GOP is now overwhelmingly white. Democrats, by contrast, are now a multiethnic coalition that is viewed by many as being more representative of where the country’s demographics are headed.Among the multiethnic candidates, Ilhan Omar in Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib in Michigan were elected as the first Muslim women to the House. Sharice Davids in Kansas and Deb Haaland in New Mexico became the first Native American women to be elected to the House. And in New York, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 29, became the youngest woman elected to Congress.Former President Barack Obama congratulated the Democrats for electing a record number of women and minority candidates.“The more Americans who vote, the more our elected leaders look like America,” Obama said in a statement, as reported by the Washington Post.However, the midterms fell short of delivering the sweeping repudiation of President Trump that Democrats had wanted. In the U.S. Senate elections, they lost seats in Indiana, North Dakota and Missouri, where Sen. Claire McCaskill lost to Republican Josh Hawley. But the Democrats picked up a seat in Nevada.Overall, Democrats picked up at least seven governorships, scoring victories across much of the upper Midwest and Kansas.